sun blindness
by Taort
Summary: "It's okay," Alibaba tells them when she dies, but he's crying harder than Mariam. "It's okay, I'll take care of you guys. We'll be fine!" Cassim wraps his arms around them and thinks he should have been older. older!Alibaba/younger!Cassim au, drabble series
1. Chapter 1

There's an older kid, bright hair, bright face, who loves them. He coddles Mariam. He likes to call himself the older brother, but Cassim doesn't see it; as the older brother, he should be a shield, like Cassim is for Mariam. Alibaba is stronger and quicker and more talented, but he is stupid and naive; he's too blind to protect them.

He tries to coddle Cassim, too.

Sometimes Cassim looks into his face until he thinks he will get spots in his eyes, as if he were looking at the sun, and he wants to tell him. Alibaba wants to take care of them, and Cassim wants to tell him what he hasn't taken care of. He wants to take away the film covering his eyes and show him the world as it really is. He wants to see Alibaba's face when he finds out.

He wastes his chance, and Alibaba's mother shows him instead. She is kinder by far than Cassim would be, letting him believe it has been overcome. (It hasn't.) Anise is not like Alibaba, he knows. Her face is bright as his but her eyes are brown and dark with sight; she sees what her son does not. He wonders why she doesn't show him, but maybe, like Cassim, she thinks of it and thinks of it but is stopped each time by an odd clench in her chest. He likes to think there could be any similarity between him and Anise. He can't quite fool himself into thinking there could be any between him and Alibaba.

"It's okay," Alibaba tells them when she dies, but he's crying harder than Mariam. "It's okay, I'll take care of you guys. We'll be fine!" Cassim wraps his arms around them and thinks he should have been older.

Soon enough, Alibaba gets whisked off to the palace, as if the world itself gets a clench in its chest when it thinks about opening his eyes. Cassim's father dies at his hands and Cassim's sister dies in his arms, and he wonders if he has any family left.

Alibaba comes back, and he wonders if he wants any.

(Alibaba comes back, and Cassim clouds his eyes with smoke and whispers.)


	2. Chapter 2

("Be good to those children, Alibaba," his mother had told him. "They can use the kindness.")

Mariam was always the sweet one. She liked holding hands and listening to Alibaba talk and looking up at him with adoration in her gaze. She liked _Alibaba_. It made her easy to deal with and easy to be around, the exact opposite of her brother. (But although they looked different when they looked at him, her smiling and him scowling, he never could miss their resemblance to one another; it was strongest when they looked away, when they both tilted up their chins just so, and their frowns were soft and quiet beneath distant, stone yellow eyes.)

Cassim was always challenging Alibaba, literally and figuratively. When he wasn't getting in trouble with the street vendors, he was demanding some kind of game or race or competition. He wanted to win against Alibaba so badly, but if he got mad when he lost, it was nothing compared to when Alibaba lost on purpose. It was like Cassim could tell if he put in even the slightest bit less effort than he was capable of.

Probably, it was because he could. Cassim was notably younger for sure, but not by all that much, and every year the difference grew smaller. He was clever, and his eyes were sharp; even as a child, Alibaba suspected, he could see through a person if he had the mind to do it.

To Alibaba, the two of them were always vibrant and distinct, and if Mariam barely spoke and Cassim's words were all distractions, he just never had the thought-that maybe there was something there in what they didn't say. That maybe, even though he tried to be their role model and their _family_, he didn't know them as well as he should have. It was no wonder Cassim always told him off when he said he was like their older brother, when he'd never so much as asked about their parents.

But he kept trying. When his mother became their mother, too, to him it meant he really was their brother, and he had to be a better one. (Kindness, he decided, wasn't just being nice. It was concern. It was attention.)

Cassim listened to Anise like he'd never listened to Alibaba, and Alibaba couldn't blame him. But after she died, Cassim only became more and more independent, and Alibaba couldn't even manage to guide him towards better work.

Some part of him hoped that for Cassim, who tried to be so strong and capable and never let Alibaba see him cry, it was just his way of mourning.

He didn't end up remaining near him long enough to find out.

When the men from the palace came to take him away, the last thing he wanted to do was leave his siblings. He'd flatly refused, without the slightest hesitation. It had deterred them enough that they glanced at each other uneasily, told him they'd give him time to think and return to ask again later, and left on the spot.

Something about the way they said it unsettled him, like they didn't intend to give him a choice the next time they came around. So he told Cassim. (Sometimes Cassim looked at him and it was like knives of stone bearing into his skin, never enough to draw blood. He wished it would be.)

"You don't even want to meet your father?" Cassim said. _My family is with you,_ he wanted to say. _It's always been with you._ But he couldn't say it, couldn't find where his voice had retreated to, wounded as it was by Cassim's unruffled tone. It's not like he expected Cassim to ask him to stay. After all, he got angry with Alibaba over the slightest things; it would be more in his nature to get irritated, perhaps accuse him of wanting to go, or maybe even demand he did.

But Cassim wasn't acting angry, either. It was like he didn't even care.

In the end, it didn't matter. The men came back with bigger men, and Alibaba was thrown bodily into the carriage.

When he finally returned, years later, Cassim had grown to be nearly as tall as him. (If it weren't for that, he might have thought he were seeing things; for Cassim, it seemed, it took a moment longer to realize he was solid flesh.)

Years apart gave people a lot of time to think about each other, to reconsider things. Alibaba still didn't know exactly what Cassim was thinking or feeling, before he left, but now-now Cassim greeted him with a shout and a laugh, excited to catch up with him and bring him along to his hangout. He introduced him to his friends as "my big brother, Alibaba," something he'd never done before. At Alibaba's startled look, he offered up a dry smile, the face of someone owning up to old, embarrassing ways. Alibaba's chest grew warm.

Cassim leaned in close and waved a hand at all the men around them as he told Alibaba, in quiet, conspiratorial tones, that they still considered _him_ too young to drink or smoke, but _Alibaba_ wasn't, was he? Alibaba took the drink, awash in pride and long-awaited acknowledgment, while Cassim told him of how the slums had been fixed up. He commented offhand on how Mariam hardly left him alone, how she always wanted to be wih him and in his business, and Alibaba laughed, thinking how she hadn't changed at all. (He used to be a little jealous of how close they were, and how much they looked like one another. He used to think maybe, if he looked the part, too, if his eyes were only two shades dimmer and deeper, Cassim would recognize him as a brother. Now he started to realize that he always had, and it was only pride as an elder sibling himself which kept him from admitting it.)

Alibaba kept drinking, and Cassim looked up at him and asked him about palace life.

In a matter of days from then, late at night, he found himself rushing out into the courtyard without thinking. He had no idea what he could possibly do, but he knew, he _knew_ that Cassim would be there, and he had to go. He had to.

Someone came up behind him and knocked him over the head, and he could barely feel the dirt scrape his palms through the ringing in his ears. "Wait," came a voice, and Cassim approached. Alibaba lifted his head to look just as he crouched down to meet his gaze. "Just leave him. He won't do anything," Cassim said, and even as he addressed someone else, Alibaba looked into his eyes and felt stone knives carve through him.

"Right? You won't do anything."

(He did worse. He ran.)


	3. Chapter 3

It's years later, and Alibaba finds that he and Cassim stand exactly eye to eye. Cassim's going to be taller than him, he realizes with a jolt. Alibaba has already grown as tall as he ever will, but Cassim has another year or so in him, and yet when their eyes meet they are in perfect, startling alignment. It's disorienting, in the same way everything about Cassim seems to be disorienting now, from the easy, confident way he has of carrying himself to the length of his hair. A burn in Alibaba's chest wants him to go back to being a child.

"How's Mariam?" he ends up asking. He regrets it the moment he sees Cassim's face, the way his mouth falls open just enough to show a sliver of teeth and something that isn't quite disbelief. It's gone right away, as soon as Cassim answers, but the imprint of it lingers.

"Mariam is dead."

"What?" Alibaba exclaims, walking into every trap laid for him just like always. "Since when?" He's told, and the floor drops out from underneath him. "Why... why didn't you tell me?!"

"How could I tell _you_?" Cassim snarls, and Alibaba's chest burns more fiercely at noticing that Cassim can now look _down_ at him, with just the slightest tilt of his jaw. "With what you're like-!" He cuts off there, but the blow connects all the same. And maybe he meant to do that, because as Alibaba opens his mouth to retort, to insist he can and should tell him, it dies in his throat at the thought that he _isn't_ reliable. It shows, he's sure, even to strangers-how could he expect to be depended on by someone who knew him as intimately as Cassim?

Once upon a time, even sweet Mariam kept him in the dark.

But he can help now, Cassim tells him. Cassim needs him. Alibaba isn't stupid; he knows he's being used again, strung along just as he was as a teenager. But it was with honeyed words then, a pleasing distortment of Cassim and all the world around him, whispering to him everything he wanted to hear and showing to him everything he wanted to see; now, Cassim toys with him with nothing but the raw-voiced truth, and it's nothing Alibaba wants but he can't possibly turn away.


End file.
